Holiday easter eggs show up in Google Search

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Google employees are no strangers to hiding little surprises across their services to make users smile when they stumble across them. This holiday season is no exception, as Google has modified several search terms to deliver a themed addition to your search results.

When you perform a search on Google’s homepage for “Christmas”, “Hanukkah”, or “Kwanzaa”, your search results will contain a little something extra. Don’t worry, the actual search results aren’t affected, but there’s a matching holiday border at the top of the page.

Christmas search results offer a Google-themed string of lights across the top of the results, while Hanukkah (alternative spelling “Chanukkah” works as well) delivers a string of golden stars. Kwanzaa offers the kinara candle arrangement. Once you move on to something else in the search results, the holiday easter egg disappears. Curiously, the Hanukkah search results have the News tab removed from the quick tab above the results, moving it to the drop down labeled More. Both Christmas and Kwanzaa have the News tab right next to Shopping on the tab list.

This is a neat little gesture that is sure to make a few people smile, but it wouldn’t be a Google easter egg if there wasn’t something to make you laugh. Searching for “Festivus” on Google’s homepage will also generate a themed result. Instead of a string across the top of the page, you get the Festivus pole all the way down the left hand side of your search results.

This is, of course, just the top of a list of easter eggs Google is famous for deploying. Throughout the years Google has managed to sneak surprises into their datacenter walkthroughs, YouTube pages, and their chat service just to name a few. The company also manages a different easter egg in every version of their Android OS, usually themes to whatever desert themed codename the version was labeled.